Porcupine bites skier Malls are dying The LED dawn at 29c3, the 29th Chaos Communication Congress Buddy Holly's demo for "Words of Love" "In the house they built together" Test Driving the Apocalypse Your Cisco phone is listening to you: 29C3 talk on breaking Cisco phones Porcupine bites skier
By Mark Frauenfelder on Dec 30, 2012 12:20 pm "Ha ha ha ha ha. I get it on video." (Via Arbroath)
Read in browser Malls are dying
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 30, 2012 10:29 am There's something nice about going into a well-maintained, well-thought-through shop -- indeed, there's a whole genre of fiction about this. But the dark side of retail is the sprawling American megamall, the original killer of the downtown and the mom-and-pop shop, which turned the public square into a private space and brought crushing sameness to ...
Read in browser The LED dawn at 29c3, the 29th Chaos Communication Congress
By Quinn Norton on Dec 30, 2012 10:28 am Dawn is breaking over last day of the annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany. CCC is the meeting of the Chaos Computer Club (also CCC), a group of German hackers hanging out together since 1981. Congress (as it is also known) is one of the great gatherings of tribes in the hacker world -- ...
Read in browser Buddy Holly's demo for "Words of Love"
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 30, 2012 09:28 am Experimenting with double-tracking his voice and guitar, Buddy Holly recorded a demo for a song he'd composed (by himself, despite his producer/manager taking half the songwriting credit).
Read in browser "In the house they built together"
By Rob Beschizza on Dec 29, 2012 10:12 pm Ink's Sarah Gish tells the story of the unique life that Rachel and Tyler Fracassa made for themselves and their family, and her decision to stick with it after his death. Last year, the couple built a homestead on a 16-acre plot of land in Urich, Mo. The one-room house was enveloped by three pastures, ...
Read in browser Test Driving the Apocalypse
By Aengus Anderson on Dec 29, 2012 04:00 pm On December 21, instead of waking up to fire and brimstone, I woke up and read Mitch Horowitz's “Once More Awaiting 'The End.'” Horowitz looks at our apocalypse fetish and sees a society so jaded with the present it dreams of a break from routine, even if that break is a disaster. He also points ...
Read in browser Your Cisco phone is listening to you: 29C3 talk on breaking Cisco phones
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 29, 2012 03:02 pm Here's a video of Ang Cui and Michael Costello's Hacking Cisco Phones talk at the 29th Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin.
Read in browser Meet SparkTruck, an “educational build-mobile” for the twenty-first century.
Dreamed up by a group of Stanford d.school students and funded through Kickstarter, SparkTruck is a mobile maker space currently traveling across the United States. At schools and summer camps and libraries around the country, the SparkTruck team offers workshops to help kids “find their inner maker” as they design and build projects like stamps, stop-motion animation clips, and “vibrobots.”
[video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmRKXqDwieY&feature=plcp]
This might seem all shiny and new. And it is—but only in part. What’s so striking (and exciting) about SparkTruck is the way it combines old and new. It does so in the tools it gets kids using, which range from pipe cleaners to laser cutters. It does so in its educational approach, which combines cutting-edge (get it?) STEM and design pedagogy with the fundamentals of an old-school shop class. And it does so in its method, which combines the iconic, century-old technology of the bookmobile with the hot new form of the maker space.
In doing so, SparkTruck joins a growing number of libraries which are combining time-tested principles (like equal access to information) with new technologies (like 3-D printers), putting in maker spaces and media production labs alongside bookshelves and meeting rooms. As I’ve argued over on bookmobility.org, these combinations make sense because reading and making actually have a lot in common. They’re both creative processes that take existing materials and combine them in new ways. Getting people engaged in those kinds of processes—through imaginative thinking, contemplation, hands-on problem-solving, and collaborative learning—is what both maker spaces and libraries are all about.
Taking that commitment on the road with scissors and hammers and 3-D printers and a great big bookmobile-like truck, SparkTruck serves as a laboratory for new approaches, as well as a reminder that trying new things doesn’t have to (and probably shouldn’t!) necessarily mean tossing old ones out.
After all, what would those vibrobots be without classically crafty pipe cleaners and tongue depressors? And what would a library be without the creative, participatory, straight-up awesome experience of reading?
SparkTruck schedule [sparktruck.org]
How to arrange a visit from SparkTruck [sparktruck.org]
SparkTruck YouTube channel [youtube.com]
Signature: --Derek Attig, bookmobility.org
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